MUSIC SCENE: Rod Picott followed a determined path

Friday

Apr 11, 2014 at 12:00 AMApr 28, 2014 at 7:23 AM

Picott worked for 18 years in construction and eschewed working in cover bands. He gladly kept his day job to pay the bills, then moved to Nashville in 1996 and began working his way up the music ladder.

By Jay N. MillerFor The Patriot Ledger

The idea of a singer-songwriter depicting working class life is almost a cliche in Americana music, a style that consciously seeks to keep its subject matter as simple and direct as its instrumentation. But even within those parameters, Berwick, Maine native Rod Picott is an exceptional writer, whose tunes are as deceptively simple, yet as deeply evocative, as any of the classic literary workingman-chroniclers like John Steinbeck or Sherwood Anderson.

Picott has just released his sixth album, “Hang Your Hopes on a Crooked Nail,” and he’s performing Saturday afternoon at Atwood’s Tavern in Central Square, Cambridge. (It’s a 4 p.m. show, with all tickets $10, available at the door or through www.BrownPaperTickets.com.)

Picott comes by his blue collar roots honestly, as his father was a shipyard welder, and Picott himself worked for 18 years in construction, where drywall and sheetrock were his specialty. Although he grew up with Slaid Cleaves, the noted songwriter who found early success on the New England coffeehouse circuit before moving to Austin, Texas and being ‘discovered’ by Americana devotees, Picott had a much slower, more determined path. Picott eschewed working in cover bands, gladly kept his day job to pay the bills, moved to Nashville in 1996 and began working his way up the music ladder.

“I had made the decision very early on that I wasn’t interested in playing covers,” Picott said. “I was pursuing songwriting, which is a difficult discipline. I did not see it as a struggle at all–my day job allowed me to develop as a writer. I hated being in cover bands when I was a kid. I felt like I was writing songs because you were supposed to do that, and original music was all there was. I might’ve been interested in writing fiction, but I had fallen in love with rock ’n’ roll and great songwriters. I think I’ve been really lucky that way.”

Picott worked his way into a weekly gig hosting a songwriters’ roundtable, and then worked some with Allison Krauss and Union Station. In those days, Picott would drive the merchandise truck from show to show and once in a while serve as opening act. He was 35 by the time he released his debut album, “Tiger Tom Dixon’s Blues,” whose title cut was an homage of sorts to a relative who’d been a boxer.

Around that same time, Canadian songsmith Fred Eaglesmith became a Picott fan, and a song the two wrote together, “Broke Down,” won Song of the Year for 2001 at the Austin Music Awards. Back in 2011, when Picott released his excellent, and semi-autobiographical “Welding Burns” album, he told us that his songwriting models had been Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle, James McMurtry and Woody Guthrie, but he’d also loved Tom Petty, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and later, Guy Clark, and Lucinda Williams.

For the latest album, Picott recruited producer R.S. Field, a studio wizard best known for his work with fellow iconoclasts like Hayes Carll, Billy Joe Shaver, and Justin Townes Earle. The result is a typically subtle yet tremendously affecting work, from the world-weary ballad “I Might Be Broken Now” to the Earle/McMurtry reminiscent anthem “Where No One Knows My Name,” a spot-on take of trying to escape a stifling small town. There’s a gritty ode to a “’65 Falcon” that somehow finds the romance in that ancient economy car.

But “You’re Not Missing Anything” might encapsulate some of Picott’s gift, for the wistful ballad is sung to a departed love, perhaps one who’s left the singer, or perhaps one who’s passed away. But it is the little details, the sharply observed outlines of a life, that tear your heart out: “Two coffee cups here beside the bed, I made too much again, sometimes I forget.”

But Picott can also be wickedly funny, as on the rollicking “Mobile Home,” which treads the delicate line between humor and pathos, taking a light-hearted look at the situation without making fun of the people in it. “Strange it’s called a mobile home ... you ain’t going nowhere..”

“I worked on that song a couple years,” said Picott. “It is a really hard balance to achieve. You want it to sound real, but you can’t talk down to the people involved. In this case I’m NOT making fun of them – I’m the guy. That’s an autobiographical tune about how I lived at one point. I love songs that can be double duty: funny and poignant. But in a case like this, if it doesn’t sound real, you’re just writing a joke, and I don’t want that.”

Connecting with Field for the new record was what Picott considers a lucky development.

“I had reached out to a few producers I felt might be interested,” said Picott. “RS responded immediately, and called me back right away. We talked it over and he had me go to his home to go over the songs together. He was fully engaged and wanted to hear the songs right away, and was sending me text messages with suggestions that first night. I had been checking out his previous stuff, and knew he had put out some great records.

“I don’t think this album is markedly different than my previous ones,” Picott added. “RS didn’t change anything major, just gave me simple guidance. A big part of a producer’s job is ‘casting the record,’ getting the right musicians to play on it, and he made some great choices. RS is also a very funny guy, a kind of mad genius, and I enjoyed working with him. Making a record is like building a house: you love the final product even if you don’t remember all the details of the hard work that went into it.”